Before the Night
by MissGabriellaXIII
Summary: An introduction to a far younger, more innocent Erik, in a world of his own and confused at his mother's rejection of him. Oneshot, a year or two before his ordeal with the gypsies.


_**A/N:**__** This little oneshot is inspired by the opening music to the Phantom of the Opera trailer, strangely enough. Sequences in black-and-white with the sound of a music-box playing have always touched me, I don't know why...This will be about Erik as a child, before he joined the gypsies. As my copy of Kay's Phantom **__**STILL**__** has not arrived (why, Amazon? Whyyy?), this version of Erik will be mostly my own. There is another fanfic in the making, which may appear quite soon - so keep your eyes peeled:)**_

_**The Phantom of the Opera and all related characters belong to Leroux/Webber/Kay.**_

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The sea gently washed over the grey pebbles that lay around the shore, bubbling and frothing through the gaps between them before drawing back again, leaving them dark and shiny in the breezy air. The clouds that covered the sky were so smoothly joined that they seemed to be one, making the heavens appear a dirty white in colour with no visible sun. Today the wind came in from across the sea, hailing from over the English coasts so far away. It stirred the salty, greenish-brown plants that stiffly waved their brittle branches at the sun that was not there.

Further down the beach was a small pile of stones. They had been carefully and neatly placed so that they formed the tiny walls of a very small building, the pebbles stacked with meticulous precision. After a moment, a pair of feet arrived next to the building, and a small boy dressed in a white shirt knelt down, putting his armful of solicitously chosen pebbles on the ground as he smiled at his handiwork. His castle would be the biggest and grandest yet, out of all the pebble-castles the other children left on the beach! Oblivious to everything in the entire world but his small building of stones, the thin young boy began to pile the new pebbles on, balancing them, keeping them straight. The salty wind ruffled his black curls, and stirred the stray threads at the edges of the cloth mask that covered his face.

The boy had spent hours picking at the mask's eye-holes to make them bigger, pulling out each individual thread until he could see properly and his long eyelashes no longer caught on them. His mother had cut them too small in her haste to cover his features, and she had never truly looked at him to check the spacing of his sickly yellow eyes. But of course, now it did not matter, for he had methodically sorted out the problem, and now he could see. The cloth over his nose grew so uncomfortable, though...

The small boy paused in his work, checked quickly that nobody was in sight, and then lifted the bottom of the mask, closing his eyes as he slowly, deeply breathed in the sea air. Satiated, he let the cloth fall back over his face and cover the gaping hole of his absent nose, carrying on with the task at hand. He piled stone over stone, his hidden face full of concentration, the world around him becoming irrelevant once again.

This was the strange child known to precious few people as Erik, the son of the woman who lived in the small house by the sea. His father was unknown to the locals, but could well have been Death himself judging by the boy's appearance. The people who lived nearby often warned their children to keep away from him...there was something odd about the way the boy seemed always lost in his own world, his eyes full of an unnerving, burning intelligence behind that cloth mask that was so freakishly flat in front - and you heard stories, too...

The child, Erik, placed the last stone down, and admired his castle, the moisture of the damp pebbles seeping through the knees of his trousers. In his head, he could see the castle even bigger, even grander, but what frustrated him was that sometimes the pictures he saw in his head just would not appear in the real world. Why didn't everything work as it was supposed to? If he could see it, why couldn't it happen?

At night, the pictures in his mind became startlingly real, and this was what enthralled him the most. When he slept, he would see wondrous things - once he had even had a strange and happy picture, of his mother holding him in her arms, letting him bury his face in the fabric of her dress. However, these scenes that happened within his mind always made him cry the following day when his mother pushed him away gently but firmly, closing herself in her bedroom when he tried to repeat what had happened in his dream. Getting up from where he sat, Erik pouted, brow creasing as he stared out to sea. In the dreams his mother willingly held him, just like the woman he had seen the week before embracing her daughter. He had glimpsed them from the other end of the beach, and had stood and stared at the simple gestures of love the mother and child exchanged. This had worried him for a long time; why wouldn't _his_ mother kiss him, hold him, smile at him? Even when he drew her the very best drawing he could possibly manage, even when he spent hours searching for pretty seashells to give to her, she would still keep her distance with a look of heavy despair in her eyes. Was there something wrong with his dear Maman, if she did not behave as all the other mothers he saw?

Erik put his arms around himself out of habit, worried as a thought came to him, a thought no child his age should have: Or was there something wrong with _him_?

He knew that no other boys or girls who lived nearby had a face like his. It had never bothered him until recently; his face had only been something to be covered with a musty, rough cloth - a cloth he willingly wore to stop his mother from being sad. He was convinced that if only he could please her enough, she would love him...but now he began to realise that even though the other children had different features to each other, all of them had noses, fair skin, and bright, vividly coloured eyes. All of them were _beautiful_.

Erik looked up at the sky, feeling a lump rise in his throat as his small hands gripped the sides of his shirt for the comfort it could not provide. Was this why his mother avoided him, and grew tense and scared whenever he entered approached her? Was it really because he had no beauty? No, it couldn't be...he had beauty - he _made _beautiful things for her, collected beautiful shells and pieces of driftwood for her...yet still she kept away! She looked at him sometimes as if in disappointment - so different from the happy pictures he saw in his head at night. But now, of course, the happy pictures he used to see were turning into frightening pictures, pictures that made him wake up screaming in the darkness, gasping and wailing. His mother would eventually come in, and he would slip, crying and sobbing, from his bed, coming barefoot across the room towards her, reaching out, wanting to be held and comforted. Yet she would always turn white and stretch out her hands, not to gather her crying son in her arms, but to keep him away. '_Go back to bed, Erik_,' she would say. '_Please...go back to bed - it was just a dream. Stop crying..._' It was an order, not consolation, but nevertheless he would obey her, his loud, frightened sobs turning to quiet weeping as he returned to his bed. Then she would leave him in the darkness, alone with his terrors.

On the beach Erik's fists clenched in anguish. He had so often caught her staring at the other children at play - at the other parents with their sons and daughters, their perfect, pretty little children with no masks. The wistful look in her eyes hurt him; it was as if she would much rather have one of those children than him. This made him realise that...maybe she did not hold any love for him at all.

A raw sob ripped through Erik, and his face contorted behind the cloth. In a fit of rage, he lashed out with arms and feet, pebbles flying everywhere as he destroyed his castle. Some stones stuck him, where they would leave bruises, but in the heat of his fury, he did not notice, kicking his carefully built castle again and again until it was nothing but an ugly heap of stones on the ground. Now that the castle he had spent so long building was ruined, Erik sank to his knees, the cloth mask becoming damp and sticking to his wet face as he wept. Drying his tears with a sigh after a short moment of thin, hopeless crying, he reached out a hand and began to start building again, piling stones carefully, losing himself once more in his world where nothing mattered.


End file.
